For The Throne — Brews For Your Pre-Set 3 Blues

Spoiler season is here again! The Dusk Road cards have started flowing in and the set is looking to be very exciting. While I, unfortunately, do not have a card to spoil today, I do have some fun and interesting decks for you to play for the next few weeks until the set drops. All of these decks are intended for ranked ladder. I cannot guarantee all of these decks are good, though they are all fun, with some of them being much better than I expected. Let’s jump in!

This deck is based around three cards: West-Wind Herald, Statuary Maiden, and Black-Sky Harbinger. Statuary Maiden is an all-around incredible card that wins games on her own, all while being very difficult for aggro to deal with. Most importantly, her cudgels are very strong on West-Wind Herald and Black-Sky Harbinger. Meanwhile, the Herald is a value machine that allows you to draw several cards or re-use removal. Additionally, with Quarry in the deck, you can live the dream and discard a Channel the Tempest via Quarry and cast it a few turns sooner with the Herald. Lastly, Black-Sky Harbinger is just a great card, especially in the aggro-heavy metagame on ladder. It become even better when it has a multitude of cudgels at it’s disposal.

The rest of the cards are mostly efficient removal and draw spells. A few of the cards can be tweaked around depending on your meta, especially the Lightning Storms and Annihilates. Molot & Nakova has proven to be a pretty strong finisher and has won me every game I’ve drawn it. Drawing lots of cards, recurring spells, and melting your opponents board with big dragons—what more can you ask for in a deck? I’m also about to hit masters playing almost entirely this deck, and it’s proven itself to be a lot more than a pile of cards with light synergies.

This deck is just a slight variation on the Xenan Midrange decks we’ve seen recently, mostly taking a more aggressive slant while also borrowing old technology from the Xenan Killers decks from before Omens of the Past. Because silences and Statuary Maidens have been everywhere recently, Dawnwalker has lost a lot of their power, though the rest of Xenan remains quite strong. To adapt, I cut the Dawnwalkers and Obelisks and focused on early game tempo with a playset of Sabotages and cards to take advantage of them.

The deck uses a pair of Beastcaller’s Amulet, an old combo which work very well with Friendly Wisp and Argenport Instigator. With Sabotage, you can discard any removal that would otherwise thwart your Amulet to give you a safe attack. The amulet provides further synergy with Auric Interrogator by giving it another means of getting to five attack. Friendly Wisp comes in over Blistering Wasp to give the deck the draw it needs to outvalue your opponent. Impending Dooms also come in, as your goal is to end the game quickly. Stray works very well for the current ladder metagame, allowing you to kill a bunch of units under all your five and six health units. All of these changes attempt to streamline the deck into being very tempo oriented—curving out with Sabotage, Friendly Wisp, Beastcaler’s Amulet and Sandstorm Titan is a beating. Though this particular list is less tested than the Felnscar list above, it is still fairly similar to the successful Xenan decks we have already seen and has shown this in the games I’ve played with it.

This last piece is definitely the most experimental and least tuned deck but it is definitely fun. The idea is to play a fairly aggressive Rakano deck, trying to put your opponent on the back foot and get them somewhat low. When you finally have an opportunity, you hit them with one almighty swing via Righteous Fury, Victor’s Cry, or some combination of pump spells and weapons. Particularly painful turns (for your opponent) involve casting Righteous Fury on a Flying or Overwhelm unit at the end of their turn followed by a Deepforged Plate. Additionally, if you have a Victor’s Cry revenging, you can use it to setup a kill either on its own or in tandem with Plate or Righteous Fury. Rakano struggles in a world of Slays, and this deck attempts to solve that issue by killing them before they get the chance to do so. A very fun part about playing this deck is playing against the same person multiple times; after they’ve seen what you’re capable of, they will often be very cautious to spend all their power in fear of getting blown up.

Like with the other decks, tune to your metagame—Vanquish is generally a better at three or four copies, but I seem to get far more Rally Queen opponents than anything else. Otherwise, this deck is set up to still be fairly tame and play a normal game that’s capable of explosive turns. If you want to double down on the out-of-nowhere kills, you can trade out some of the safer choices like Shogun’s Scepter for Censari Brigand or the very brave Twinbarrel. Note that Censari Brigand benefits from the double damage provided by Righteous Fury and Twinbarrel as the “double damage to players” is separate from the normal “double damage” keyword, giving you quadruple damage. Just a single finest hour on a quadruple damage Brigand is enough to deal 20 to the player.

Coming soon to an Armory Metagame near you

That’s all for today. Be sure to share your thoughts and results in the Reddit thread here!

– Paradox

P.S. a Huge congratulations to our very own TheSkeeJay for becoming a Twitch partner! If you haven’t already seen his stream, you can watch him at twitch.tv/TheSkeeJay